“I don’t want to leave,” I tell him, cracking out the words as the world goes fuzzy around the edges. “I want to stay with you.”
“Liar.” He squeezes harder. “You always say that, and then one day I’ll come home and have to track you down, find you talking to people, maybe telling them stories.” He frowns. “My mother hated storytelling. You know what she used to do to me when I did it?”
I can’t breathe, but that’s not why he lets the pressure up. He lets go a little so I can nod. Because he knows I will. I am not strong; I cannot stop him or even slow him down. I can only wait until he gets so tired of me that he lets me die and moves on.
“She would punish me,” he says. “Hold me down and show me how all we think of is sin. How we are all sin.” He spits the last word out, like he can taste it, and then touches my hair, slides his fists under my shirt and twists the sullen rise of my right breast, the little lump that’s there. “Would you be that kind of mother?”
“No.”
Ray has never come out and said it, but I know from years of listening to him dream that his mother did to him what he does to me. Held him down, rubbed him raw, broke him open. In them, he cries and begs her not to touch him, that he doesn’t want to go inside her, that he is a good boy, he really is.
I let Ray have his nightmares, watch him thrash and listen to his voice squeak with fear. I lie there and watch him and wish he was trapped back there, with her, and had never broken free.
But his mother died when he was eighteen, burned to death because she fell asleep smoking a cigarette. Ray got an insurance check from the church school where she worked as a secretary and moved away.
He met the first Alice a year later.
His mother never smoked. But she was such a private woman, he’s told me, that people just assumed she’d kept it a secret. She seemed the type to do that.
“You aren’t listening,” Ray says, and his hands tighten again. “You know you’re supposed to listen when I talk.” He shoves me to the floor and pulls off my pants.
I stare at the ceiling while he sweats and thrusts, air aching down my throat and into my lungs until he grabs my hair and says, “I know what I’m going to do. What’s going to change.”
He pushes faster then, harder, and slams my head into the floor over and over until my vision is bright and fuzzy and there are strands of my hair caught in his hand.
I think of the knife in the kitchen, of the bridges I’ve seen from the bus or on the way to church or the supermarket (Ray and I go every Saturday morning. Ray stares at little girls and I stare at the food), and feel my heart cramp.
It will be over soon, finally, but the thing about hearts is that they always want to keep beating.
They want to keep beating, and when Ray’s finished he says, “I like that. A family. You’d be a good mother, wouldn’t you? Let me watch out for a little girl of our own? Let me take care of her? Help me teach her everything she needs to know?”
“A little girl?” In all the dreams I have had, and they are small dreams, bloody ones that end with me floating free, I never dreamed this.
He shivers into me, grinning sharper. “She’ll be so bad at first, crying and whining and maybe even screaming.” He fingers my hair. “You cried, remember? You screamed. And now look at you. Happy as can be.”
I nod, mind as numb as the rest of me. He is not letting me go. He wants me to stay. He wants me to find a girl for him.
For us.
He can’t mean it. I will find him one, a beautiful little stupid girl, as dumb as the one at 623 Daisy Lane used to be, and show her to him. He will want her, with her little limbs and happy face and solid, live flesh.
She will become the new Alice, and he will want her so much he will forget all about me. Kill me to teach her a lesson, probably, and then move on. Yes, that is what will happen.
What must happen.
“I’ll help you,” I tell him. “I’ll find what you need.”
He kisses my cheek and then rolls off me, motioning for me to get up. “That’s my girl.”
Not for much longer, I think, and bend over, touch my fingers to my curled up mouth.
“I see that,” Ray says, and yanks my jaw up, looks at me. “I see that smile. You want to help me, don’t you? You want to teach our girl everything I like.”
I nod, and he shoves me down again, forgetting dinner in his visions of this girl to come, this new child. This new me.
26
I AM ALLOWED TO LEAVE THE HOUSE the next afternoon.
Ray has given me bus fare and told me the name of a park he wants me to go see. It is close to the apartment but not too close, a short ride in his truck but a long ride on the bus, and he tells me to remember everything I see.
I get to the park after sitting on two buses, and blink at all the people there. So many of them, and all so young. I will never remember everything but find a bench that has bags and backpacks tossed in a stack near it anyway, watch kids run over and pull out snacks and drinks, trailing crumbs everywhere.
I try to focus, but the world is dizzy, spinning as I think of what I will find here. Ray’s prize. The new me.
She has to be just right. She has to make him forget everything.
Or at least me.
I take a breath, to slow the world down, and look.
I look and see a girl there. And there. And over there. I grab a notebook, pick up a pencil.
The first girl is blond and a little chubby, a thumb sucker. Ray would like teaching her not to do that. I carefully write down blonde and thumb.
She has a babysitter or mother, though, a woman who brings her a foil-wrapped package that the girl bats away, annoyed. Ray won’t like the mother/babysitter hovering around. But still. People can be distracted, and Ray really doesn’t like wasting food.
The other girls I see are both dark-haired like me, and both are alone, maybe dropped off by an older brother or sister who has to “watch” them, or maybe they’ve sworn to go straight home after school but come here instead. They don’t play so much as stand, sullen, watching the others. They would scream and kick, I can tell. Ray would like that too. I write scream and kick, 2, and then sit with my face turned toward the sun. I don’t bother to close my eyes.
“Have you seen my notebook?”
I blink, light burning away, and see a girl standing in front of me. Six? Seven? Eight? Doesn’t matter. She’s young.
She’s young, brownish-blond hair, and is ferociously clean and shiny, not a speck of dirt on her little white shirt or pink skirt with a smiling flower on the hem.
“Notebook?”
“It’s green and has a frog on it,” she says. “I went on the swings and now it’s not here.”
“It’s not,” I say, and stroke my fingers over the cover of the notebook I am holding closed against my chest. Tracing over the big frog sticker. “Someone must have taken it.”
“And my pencil.”
“And your pencil.”
She sighs and sits down. “It’s my favorite. My dad gave it to me for my birthday.”
“Oh,” I say, and snap the pencil in half, grinning as its pieces fall to the ground under the bench we are sitting on.
“I don’t like you,” she says abruptly. “You’re not nice.”
She gets up and goes over to the swings. I lean over and pick up half the pencil from under the bench. I write ALICE in large letters on the page, then tear it out and leave the notebook on the bench, half the broken pencil beside it.
I have found Ray’s new girl. I have found the new me. I think about her all the way home, how she will cry and scream and plead just like I did.
It makes me smile.
Everyone on the bus who sees me smile looks away. They see that I am all wrong, that my smile means someone else’s pain.
But no one says anything.
27
THREE LIFE LESSONS:
1. No one will see you.
2. No one will say anything.
3. No one will save you.
I know what the once upon a time stories say, but they lie.
That’s what stories are, you know. Lies.
Look at that, four life lessons. Now you owe me.
28
AT HOME, RAY IS TIRED AND CRANKY and makes me step on the scale three times before I’m allowed dinner. I give him what I wrote, the page marked ALICE, before he gives me my yogurt, and for a moment I think he’s going to take it away but he doesn’t.
“You can’t write worth shit,” is all he says. “Good thing you got me around to take care of you.”
I swallow a spoonful of yogurt and ask to get a glass of water. Ray won’t let me get it, but instead brings it to me, motioning for me to get up so he can sit in my chair.
“Tell me about them,” he says, throwing the paper away and patting his lap for me to sit back down, to curl into him, and I do.
His hands are gripping my arms hard before I’ve even finished describing the first one, and I don’t get to finish my yogurt. Later, he lets me eat the burned bit of his TV dinner meatloaf while he watches two doctors argue over how to treat a dying boy.
“Tell me about them again,” he says when all the lights are out except for the fairy princess night light he’s plugged into my bedroom wall, waving her magic wand to spread pink light into the room.
I imagine her melting, real light coming out of her, flame bright. Ray lying snoring as she burns, waking up when it’s far too late. That would be a real fairy godmother thing to do.
“Pretty,” I tell Ray. “They were pretty.”
“What were they wearing?”
I make up outfits, frilly little dresses with sashes and tiny white socks folded into delicate shoes. That was how he dressed me for years, until the dresses strained open across my hips and chest, until my arms came out strangled red from the binding sleeves.
“I wish we could have them all,” he says. “But we can’t be greedy. Being greedy is bad. Like you tonight, eating that meat. Did you think I wouldn’t see you?”
“I—” I say and then stop, still, made stupid by telling stories about those girls, forgetting that none of them are here, that there’s still only one he can wrap his claws around.
“You can make it up to me,” he whispers, a ghost that is all too real in my ear. Hot hands squeezing me too tight, but only where people won’t see.
And even if he decorated my neck with a ring of fingerprints and left me lying in the street, no one would notice. Not in Shady Pines, where everyone is busy working to keep their kids fed, their bills barely paid. Not anywhere, because I am nothing, unseen.
I learned that the hard way.
29
I DON’T REMEMBER MY FIRST WEEK WITH Ray, those days when I was being made into Alice, except for one thing. One thing that showed me everything he said was true, that no one wanted me back, that I had to stay with him, that if I didn’t listen bad things would happen.
I woke up at some point, broken and bruised, Ray asleep snoring on top of me. I wiggled like a fish and slipped out from under him, throwing on a neat pile of clothes lying on a table. Little-girl-who-had-cream-soda-lip-gloss clothes. Little-girl-who-knew-she-couldn’t-go-outside-undressed clothes.
Normal little girl clothes.
There was one door in the room and I opened it, stepped out into a parking lot lit by a flickering, dying streetlight, a small faded sign by the road reading ROUTE 40 MOTEL—WEEKLY RATES AVAILABLE.
Across the street was a gas station, the kind with a store that sold food and had people.
I didn’t wait to cross. I ran. I ran as fast as I could, ran straight for the signs advertising soda: 2 FOR $2! And HOTDOGS: NOW WITH FREE TOPPINGS!
There were no cars, but inside a woman sat behind a big sheet of plastic, chewing gum and watching TV. She had dark hair, like my mother, and as soon as I saw her I started to cry.
She looked up, and I waited for her to get up. To come and save me. But all she said was, “We don’t allow no one in here without shoes, even kids. You over at pump eight?”
“Sure am,” Ray said, and clamped one hand around my arm. I cried harder, words finally starting to come, rising up as I realized I had to get her to listen, to see what was really happening.
And then Ray leaned over and whispered, “Shut up or I’ll drive back to your house, not to take you home but to kill your parents and make you watch. Make you see what happens to little girls who don’t listen.”
I didn’t want my parents to die, and I already knew Ray would do it. That he would and could and did lie about other things—Don’t move and I won’t hurt you. Tell me where you live and I swear I’ll take you home now. Being good is fun, and you want to be good, don’t you?—but he wasn’t lying about this.
He took me to his car. He had a car then, a white one with a narrow backseat that I can still see even with my eyes wide open, and to this day TV where people twist around each other in cars makes something inside me scream and I have to change the channel or stay very still and not let Ray see that I hurt because my pain makes him want to hold me. Hurt me more.
I sat in the car and he paid for gas and we drove away and he pulled over onto a long wooded road and raised his fists, then pain inside and out blurring everything, breaking everything.
After that, I was Alice.
I am Alice, and Ray dreams in the night, happy dreams that wake him up and make him roll me over, my head pressed into the pillow. Suffocation looks so easy but no matter how hard I press my face down, no matter how I try to breathe in fabric, not air, there is no escape for me.
He sleeps with one arm thrown across me after, and I lie stinging sharp all over, a wet sticky puddle under me. Soon there will be a little girl here, a real one with tiny arms and legs for Ray to push into.
I want him to take her tomorrow. I want that little girl here now, where I am. I want her to be Ray’s love, to bear it. I don’t care that TV and the preacher at church say that children are treasures or little miracles or special.
They are flesh and blood like the shell around me, a thing waiting to be molded by someone’s will, and Ray wants that job. I don’t care if he takes it. If he takes everyone and everything, every child from every place. I just want him to leave me.
30
MORNING SAME AS ALWAYS, MY shows, my wait for food, except I have to wash my sheets, bleach in the washer to get out the stains. There is no one around so I pour bleach right onto the spot, watch the yellow and brown-red stain ooze, let the sharp burning smell of the bleach cramp the inside of my head.
I clean too, because Ray likes a clean house, dusting and vacuuming and picking up the socks he leaves around the apartment like little smelly snakes, curling them into his laundry basket. I get tired during, the room spinning around and around, and lie on the floor listening to the refrigerator and my heart beating loud and fast, thumpthumpthump in my chest.
Eat my yogurt, sour taste on my tongue, container warm in my hand. The refrigerator is angry with me too. I go get the sheets out of the dryer and steal four quarters someone has left on top of the washing machine.
There is a vending machine in the building but I don’t use it. What if someone saw me eating and told Ray? He says hello to the people around us, casual waves and occasional chats about the weather. I am shy, so I only say hello, pain if I don’t say it the way Ray wants or if he just feels like it.
“Homeschooling must be tough for you, what with you working and all,” someone once said to him, a brassy-haired lady with three little boys and a round pregnant stomach. “God bless you for being so devoted to your child. I’m going to do the same for mine, once Devon gets that promotion and I don’t have to wait tables no more.”
Devon ran off, and after a while, she got evicted. Before that, her little boys often had split lips and black and blue stained legs, and they stayed home from school, playing in the laundry room, more than they ever went. No one ever said a word to her either. I used to twist the tender s
kin at the back of their necks until they’d go into their apartment and bring me cookies. I could tell from looking at them that they’d never say a word to anyone.
I was sorry when they left, even though I’d stopped making them bring me cookies when I saw them flinch as I came into the laundry room one day. Ray fed me more often then, though. Now I think they could flinch all they wanted and I’d hurt them until my belly was full.
I stop at a gas station on the way to the park, peanut butter crackers paid for and stuffed in my mouth, one two three four five six. The woman behind the counter had dark hair but no one reminds me of my mother anymore.
The park is very crowded, older kids talking and smoking, the ones that don’t fit in taking time to push the smaller ones around, laughing at their power and how it works. The two dark-haired little girls from yesterday turn out to be biters, scrappy little things with snapping teeth, and when an older man, harmless because his eyes are nothing like Ray’s, asks them if they need help they scream and scream until a policewoman wanders over and asks what’s going on, looking bored and rubbing the small of her back.
I will have to tell Ray there are cops around. He will not like that. He will not like the two little girls anymore, either. They have seen things, I can tell from their screams, and they will spot him right away. They both look at me when they leave, dragged out by an older boy with fuzz above his upper lip and dirt under his fingernails.
No, they will not do. They are rattling hollow under their scowling eyes, life being drained out of them already. Ray will not want that. He will want someone whose eyes need to be opened.
I look for the little blond girl, the thumb sucker, but she is not there. I only see notebook girl, the bossy thing who actually spoke to me. She is sitting on the swings, eyes vacant as she looks up into the sky. I can’t figure out what she’s doing. She doesn’t look like she’s trying to think out of something, but like she’s trying to think into it.
“She’s pretending she’s a cloud.”
Living Dead Girl Page 3